I'm Contributors Editor at TheStreet.com, a business news, market data and stock analysis website. I was Editorial Director of Digital Book World, a website dedicated to covering the world of e-books and digital publishing. I've been a reader since 1986, a journalist since 2005 and an e-reader since 2011. I live and work in New York City.

How Much More Would You Pay for a DRM-Free Version of an Ebook?

If given the choice, would you rather pay $5.99 for a DRM-free version of an ebook or $4.61 for a version that has digital rights management software?

DRM, a hot-button issue for publishing’s digirati, is in the news again as several independent bookstores have filed a lawsuit against Amazon and the six largest U.S. publishers alleging anti-competitive behavior stemming from DRM agreements. The lawsuit claims that “secret” agreements between publishers like Random House and HarperCollins and Amazon have prevented independent bookstores from getting into the ebook business. The lawsuit does not seek damages but just wants to make it so that any kind of ebook can be read on any Amazon device and app and any Kindle ebook can be read on other devices and apps. Currently, that is not the case.

Of course, most readers aren’t quite given the choice. Amazon has a much bigger reach than the DBW store and it’s very likely that a lot of people would discover the book there and not anywhere else. Further, it has a powerful pull in the form of convenience. For example, I was talking to a digital publishing executive at a mid-size publisher yesterday and told her about my book. She told me to email her a link where she could buy it. I emailed her the link to the DRM-free version on DBW and the Amazon version. She wrote back that she bought the book from Amazon because it was more convenient. (I buy nearly all my ebooks through Amazon for the same reason.)

The responses on Twitter were split three-to-one in favor of DRM-free (literally — I got responses from four people). Of course, my Twitter following is a bit weighted toward digital publishing folks, and so I would guess it would be fairly anti-DRM as a group.

To those people who said they would pay more for a DRM-free ebook, I asked, basically, how much more. What if the DRM-free version were $10 and the protected version $3? I got several tweets like this one:

Hardcore. If I had to guess, however, I would guess that most readers don’t even know what DRM is let alone care about it. It might be a different case if it’s explained to them.

Authors, on the other hand — major stakeholders in this debate that never get their due — are fairly pro-DRM as a group. For them, I’m guessing the reason is that they don’t like the idea of people pirating their material and are generally in favor of any efforts against piracy. I know that in the times I’ve come across something I’ve written on the Web being ripped off by another website that I did not license to use the content, I’m livid.

What do you think? Would you pay more for an ebook if it came without DRM? If so, how much?

(A note on DRM, ebooks and publishers: As I understand it, Amazon does offer its Kindle Direct Publishing clients [mostly self-published authors] the opportunity to sell their books DRM-free. It’s not clear to me whether this is the case with established publishers that have wide-ranging relationships with Amazon. F+W Media, my employer, sells all its ebooks directly through its own stores, DRM-free. But if you buy my ebook on Amazon, it has DRM. A casual survey of titles from O’Reilly, a famous DRM-free publisher, and Carina Press, a division of romance publisher Harlequin that sells DRM-free, show that their titles on Amazon do have DRM. Ellora’s Cave, an independent erotic romance publisher that sells DRM-free ebooks also has DRM on its Kindle ebooks.)

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I would have to side with Lance. Price probably wins. Since much of my digital reading comes on a cellphone, I can (for the most part) just download the application compatible with the retailer of my choice. Would I like each of my ebooks to instead be in one place? Absolutely. But maybe there is a way to do this while still preserving DRM?

Let’s face it — with kindle DRM you’re not buying a book with unknown expiration time (being unable to read book the they you like) so it’s just like buying option vs. buying stock. So this is unfair comparison :)

I wouldn’t take what people say as gospel on this. People do want DRM free – but given how easy it is to remove DRM they are not going to pay any appreciable extra for the privilege of not having their purchase deliberately hamstrung. People might want to buy computers that worked as opposed to computers that don’t work, but if what causes computers to not work is simply a padlock put on by the manufacturer, they’ll buy the deliberately non functional computer and cut the padlock off. It is also a rather baffling juxtaposition, DRM costs money and does not work, but costs money to use and apply (but nothing to remove) – why a DRMd work should be cheaper than a non DRMd work is therefore a mystery.

It’s kind of a false choice. Why? Because the choice you’re proposing assumes that a DRM-free title is easier to share, when in fact it mostly involves copying the file off your tablet to your PC, then either emailing it to a friend (who must then copy it from her PC to her tablet) or plugging another tablet into your PC in order to share it. So the convenience of DRM-free is illusory.

As is the claim made by HuwOS here. Sure, nerds will go to the trouble of stripping off DRM (and some will post their DRM-free title to Bittorrent), but that also vitiates convenience. Of course, nerds feed off of inconvenience in tech — it’s what drives them. For the rest of us civilians, however, the convenience we need to share an ebook goes beyond buying a DRM-free file. We need the convenience that comes with making that file easy to share at the touch of a button. And for *that* we’ve got a long, long wait.

Compare like with like Richard, an ebook without DRM is by definition easier to share than one with it, the same process would need to be done for both, but one would have the extra step of removing DRM.

The convenience of sharing with the touch of a button is something we are quite capable of doing now, it is DRM and fear of piracy that prevents hardware from incorporating that type of feature. Which is a pity as it almost certainly reduces the overall volume of sales there could be.

I should also have mentioned that the inconvenience I’m talking about is at the heart of the just-filed suit against Amazon and the Big Six publishers by Posman Books, The Book House, and Fiction Addiction. Those stores realize that DRM enforces the walled garden ecosystems the major ebook sellers use — and of course Amazon’s Kindle uses a proprietary ebook file format, MOBI, that ereaders from B&N, Kobo, Sony, et al. cannot display. Again, these strictures are intended to enforce convenience at the e-tailer level, not at the universal shareability level.

With you on some of that but how are proprietary file formats providing convenience at any level. The files are small and making available epub and mobi files would be little different from having just one format.

Very interesting topic. As an individual and as a librarian buying library e-books, I would always go for DRM-free. But sadly, as you pointed out, in the case of your book, it’s not really a choice between DRM or no DRM, but rather between two vendors with different approaches, pricing and DRM policies. It would only be a choice if Amazon were to go the way Apple did on the iTunes Store: offer both options (with different pricing) on the same platform.

One important reason why libraries strongly prefer DRM-free versions (or at least should be) is because they are aware that their content should be made equally available to all patrons, regardless of the devices they are using or whether they suffer from a disability that would require adapting the content to their needs.

For institutions, breaking the DRMs that prevent them for doing that is not an option. In most countries currently, breaking DRMs means breaking the law, a liberty that private persons can take, but not a public institution.

My point of reference for this is what happened in the music business. Why build a digital collection of music that relies on a single provider being in existence to support it eg. Apple iTunes.

Same for digital books. I think most consumers would like to know that they truly own the copies they’ve purchased, and that if Amazon did go out of business, or if they change their minds and want to switch to another platform, they should be able to take all their books with them – without needing to figure out how to rip the DRM away (tech savvy folks can claim that it’s easy to remove DRM, but can you imagine your mum doing it?).

When a law encourages us all to be ‘pirates’, then something is broken. As was the case with format shifting CDs that we own, to digital, in order to get it onto MP3 players.

Absolutely, DRM works only against the consumer it honestly serves no other function. The only place I disagree is with… ‘Can you imagine your Mum doing it?’

While the current average older Mom might not have the necessary background to go and get the necessary to strip DRM from ebooks, the tools to do so are in many cases invisible once set up and so they could well simply have it set up for them by tech savvy relatives. However the next generation of older Moms will not be in the same position, they will be used to the idea of the internet providing what’s needed and knowing that pretty much everything can be found with a simple search as. For an industry to rely on a certain level of ignorance from their customers would be simple idiocy. It is all the more idiotic for companies to hobble their products on purpose at their own expense when the technology does not actually achieve the supposed aim of stopping,preventing or even delaying piracy.